Ordinary plain old blog PLUS frequent reflections on "1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die" by Tom Moon (of NPR and other fames)

Memo to self: When making turkey broth, boil turkey bones and meat as per usual with chicken. If chilling broth overnight, however, DO NOT OPEN POT LID UNTIL FULLY REHEATED. [Deep, bone-rattling shudder.]

Today we went back to the pond, and stood in the rain by the edge watching two ducks circle each other in a bonding ritual. Which is to say, they were courting. It just poured rain, and Joe commented "There are many puddles on the water," which was to say, I think, that the rain drops were causing lots of little ripples. The ducks were hooded mergansers, lovely birds I never tire of seeing. I still remember the first I ever saw, in a cut, or ditch at Assateague. So vivid and alive. At the distance we stood today, we could not see the bright eye or even the coloring -- just the hood, fanned open and closed during the "dance" across the dimpled water. They dove and popped up, dove and popped up. Such a lucky day.

Joe and I went for a walk today down to the nearby pond. We saw a duck of indeterminate species, chickadees, and very small fish. And a golden-crowned kinglet, with that reedy little "seep." What Joe didn't see but I did was a spot in the leaves where there were two stripes of bird whitewash. Near them was a heap of some animal's internal organs, unarranged but also undisturbed. The results of some bird of prey's hunt, I would guess, nighttime or day.

I went to the drugstore to get my wife some cold medicine. We had been to see Mystic River, which is indeed in full effect. Anyway we went home to relieve the sitter, blessed be she, and I ran out to get some cold medicine because Carol has got a monster flu. And I pulled out change to fill out the bill -- a couple pennies, so I could get a quarter back instead of two dimes and three pennies.

And there in my hand was a wheatie! A 1944 penny, with the wheat sheaf design on the "tails" face. I told the clerk, "My father kept his pennies in a red cardboard box. And one day he told me, if I would count them and stack them, then put them in rolls, then I could have half. I made, like, $5,00, and found him 75 or 80 wheaties, and a few Indian heads too." And I remember too that two of them were zinc, from World War II, when copper was going into the ships and the tanks and the jeeps. And a couple were Indian head pennies.
Those I think he went ahead and put straight in his sock drawer. I keep an Indian head penny in the ashtray of my car because I got it as change once at a fast food restaurant in the drive through. I keep meaning to send it to him. It's in with the rest of my change. But I look through my pennies before I give them to anybody in a drive-through, and if I see the Indian head, I think of my father.

He's alive and healthy and well. No melancholy. I just think of him, is all.

Here's a story that any birder will sympathize with. All sides.
So I'm making my son breakfast. (Nutty toast -- whole wheat toast with almond butter.) He's 2-1/2.
He looks out the sliding glass door. "Hey, Daddy," he says, "Do you see that mourning dove?"
I look out, and I see nothing past the deck. "Sorry buddy," I say. "I don't. Where?"
"Right there," Joe says. And what birder doesn't know how he feels?
"What's it close to?" I say.
"I don't know," he says.
"OK," I say, and bend over to look harder. "I see a leaf. Maybe you saw a leaf."
"The leaf was walking," he says brightly.
"Yeah," I say. "They're like that." We've all seen "leafbirds."
"Will you put peanuts out for the squirrel, please, Daddy?" he says.
"You bet, buddy," I say. And when I walk out on the deck, I flush a mourning dove from near the edge, where I couldn't see it from the kitchen.

Scott McCloudProbably the best-known thinker about comic strips/books/graphic novels/sequential art working right now. Controversial among comic fans but unequivocally an influential and original thinker.